Vista de sala de la exposición. Leon Golub, 2011

Leon Golub

Conversation with Jon Bird

lunes 16 mayo 2011
2:56
Politics
Painting
History
Visuality
Theory

This conversation with Jon Bird, curator of the retrospective exhibition on Leon Golub (1922-2004) at the Palacio de Velázquez, looks at the role of pictorial figuration in contemporary visual culture.

Leon Golub’s paintings usually represent scenes of extreme violence in which interrogations and torture take centre stage. At a time in which everyone had access to these types of images in photographic and audiovisual formats, the ‘classic’ types in Golub’s murals tried to restore the impermanence of sight as a sense, rather than as a decoder. As such, the eye ceases to be a reader of framed and filmed realities and once again perceives representations and constructions that raise doubts about the reliability of the medium. These reflections on the image allow viewers to become witnesses, not only to the violence represented, but to the representation. Painting, as Jon Bird explains, “is a slow art”.

Leon Golub belonged to a generation of Chicago artists for whom figuration was a mode of production in opposition to the predominant abstract expressionism. Despite this, Leon Golub’s paintings today, according to Jon Bird, are an experience in which all of the senses must be taken into account.

Production

José Luis Espejo

Locution

José Luis Espejo

License
Creative Commons by-sa 4.0

Leon Golub

Conversation with Jon Bird

Leon Golub. From 5 May to 12 September 2011

Jon Bird, curator: Certain paintings have a resonance, which is not just to the eye.
Golub is a history painter and he’s also a realist painter, although it’s a form of critical realism. He depicts scenes of violence and torture which are perpetrated by governments, both officially and unofficially. We look coming from a particular position and we make decisions about what we see.

To understand a story involves a process of decision-making. It’s both a record, a document of something, but you are a witness, you are a witness to something. And you can’t witness without being involved with making these kinds of decisions. The figures that he depicts has its source within the mass media. Painting is a slow art – its uniqueness, its specialness – but it also means that we need to spend time. A picture, a photograph, is so familiar, and offers its image, its message so quickly, so immediately that it becomes the everyday currency and it implies, it suggests that the viewing process is a slowed-down process, which I think opens it up to a much more complex range of possible interpretation.

Chicago had a strong figurative tradition. There was a group of artists in the 1950s called the Chicago Monster Roster school, which is how to come up with a visual imagery that was appropriate to a post-war subjectivity. Now for the abstract expressionism, that went on a kind of inward journey. For Golub particularly, he has a similar belief, but the belief is that that it is carried by the figure and early paintings – there’s a number of paintings from the 1950s where the Holocaust is a reference point. Certain paintings have a resonance which is not just to the eye. And one of the things about Golub’s work – not just because it deals with the figure – is that it is a relationship to the body and to the viewer’s body, so there is a kind of corporeal sense to them. You can think also about other kinds of sounds, but also through a sense of tactility, through sound, through other senses. In the later works, where he starts to introduce a much more fractured and schematic imagery, and lions and dogs and skeletons come in.